Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

Cecilia Malmström had appeared likely to pass comfortably through the European Parliament’s hearing on her nomination to be the next European commissioner for trade.

She is a former MEP; she is Sweden’s serving European commissioner (for home affairs); and MEPs view her as a good commissioner. The emerging trade agreement with the United States, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), was certain to be the focus of her session, but the probable questions – and the answers – have been repeatedly aired for many months.

The past Commission’s challenge was getting people to listen to those answers; and part of the rationale for Malmström’s selection was that she is an able communicator. In the event, the hearing turned into a gruelling experience for Malmström. The issue that was most “toxic” – her word – was the question of whether the TTIP should decide how disputes between investors should be arbitrated.

The issue of an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism became much more toxic when Malmström disowned the most controversial statement in a text that had briefly emerged in public: “no investor-state dispute settlement mechanism will be part of that agreement”. That clause, she said, was written by someone else.

Later, it emerged that the author of the disowned phrase was none other than Martin Selmayr, the right-hand man of the incoming president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. It was a telling “accident” – the word used by Malmström – that adds to the sense that ISDS, an important element of the TTIP for the US, is on death row.

There was, though, no accident involved in what proved to be Malmström’s biggest problem: the emergence of an e-mail on Sunday (28 September), the eve of the hearing, that suggested Malmström’s private office had “reached out” to the US embassy in Brussels to express “concerns similar to those” of the US about an EU data-protection proposal.

The e-mail, obtained under a freedom-of-information request in the US, also indicated what was no secret: that there was little love lost between Malmström and Viviane Reding, the then-European commissioner responsible for drafting the laws. Reding, who is now an MEP, took to social networks before the hearing to apply pressure on Malmström. Malmström seemed not to realise during the hearing quite how difficult this issue would prove for her, failing to use her closing statement to try to put the issue of data protection to rest.

The socialists and Greens called two votes in the trade (INTA) committee the next day, and demanded a written statement from Malmström, which she used to give the type of statement on data protection that she had failed to give during her hearing. Malmström survived, but she will probably have learnt some lessons about Juncker’s Commission and the complications that its more overtly political approach to EU matters could bring. She will be very clear about some of this Parliament’s priorities: its desire to have as much information and influence over trade policy as possible as well as its wish to get ISDS out of TTIP, part of a broader desire for a different approach to TTIP.

But that knowledge only sharpens the immediate dilemma for Malmström: how to keep an ISDS clause in the EU’s newly agreed trade deal with Canada, while removing it from the emerging TTIP? Malmström had started the hearing by claiming that it had long been a “dream” of hers to handle trade policy. By the end, she must have realised that trade policy is a poisoned chalice.

But there were more general and far more important lessons to derive from this hearing. The first is that chefs are stampeding into the kitchen to cook TTIP. The danger is that the result will be a dog’s breakfast.

A compensation for the European public is that the process could end up being more transparent. But it was not easy to see the transparency in the process that produced Malmström’s written statement to the Parliament. Who actually is the commissioner for trade? That question will linger. Nor did the underwhelming quality of the questioning and its narrowness prove that MEPs are likely to boost the quality of transparency and debate about TTIP to a significant degree.